The bigger a company gets, the more it compresses information before passing it upward. A frontline team observes ten signals. Their manager synthesises those into three. Their director condenses those into one. By the time anything reaches an executive, what started as rich, nuanced context has become a single headline.
It isn't malicious. It's rational. Every layer of management is optimising for what their audience can process. Executives have limited time. Meetings have fixed agendas. So information gets filtered — and the filters are never neutral. They reflect the assumptions, anxieties, and incentives of whoever is doing the filtering.
Decisions get made on compressed data. Problems that were obvious at ground level surprise leadership six months later. Strategies that made sense in the boardroom fail in the field because the field's reality never made it into the room.
The fix isn't better reporting. It's designing for signal preservation from the start — building systems where information doesn't have to travel through lossy human layers to reach the people who need it.